


The Light Gets In

by diablo77



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Gen, Missed-scene canon divergence, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, Temporary Character Death, Wheelchair User Meg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 19:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 11,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16708498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diablo77/pseuds/diablo77
Summary: After sacrificing himself to defeat an ancient evil, Castiel awakens in the Empty.  But this time, it isn't someone on Earth calling him back: it's someone he shares a powerful bond with, someone who has slipped through the cracks between the Empty and a lawless void called the Underneath. Castiel's mission to find the demon he once loved will lead him through an underworld of demons, angels, monsters, and lost souls - of fragmented memories and the final deadly risk of forgetting - hoping that the pieces of their shared past will lead him to her before it's too late.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Megstiel Big Bang 2018. Artwork by ACNOGARET.
> 
> The lines sung by Billie are from "Anthem" by Leonard Cohen.

       The Empty is the darkest dark you will ever see. If you’ve ever driven outside a city at night, far enough that the streetlights and the marquee signs fade into the distance beyond the rear view mirror, and after them the last of the yellow glows from porches and windows, until the dark outside the windshield seems to wrap around the car and the dark is the only landmark you can see. If you were to switch off the headlamps and drive further down the road, fast enough that it unraveled past even the light of the moon and stars. If you could do that, and see that the difference is just as stark as that between the city streets and a country road, it would still be as bright as day compared to the Empty. Even to an angel’s eyes, the absence of light is daunting.

       When Castiel’s eyes opened, he knew right away where he was. He’d been there before. He knew what his being there meant. What he couldn’t figure out was why, if he was here, he was awake.

       He did remember dying. He remembered the Beast; how Lucifer’s death had freed it. How God had created the Beast to destroy his mistakes before the End Times: the Leviathan, the Shedim, everything he’d made that hadn’t turned out right. But the Beast itself had grown more powerful than even God had anticipated; it had turned from devouring God’s accidental evils to deciding for itself who and what it considered a mistake. It became so powerful, in fact, that they’d learned it was the only being besides God’s own sister that could only be stopped by a Hand of God – right about the same time they learned that, in the time since Amara had left the Earth, all the ones that remained had been destroyed.

      As they stood on the battlefield facing down the Beast – Castiel, Sam, and Dean – something dawned on Castiel. “It’s me,” he said softly.

      Dean furrowed his brow, his eyes intense. “What are you talking about? What’s you?”

      “The last Hand,” Castiel said. “God put my body back together by hand. I have the divine touch.” He stared intently at them both, first one brother’s eyes and then the next. “I can defeat it.”

      “Cas, no,” said Sam, his eyes widening with obvious concern.

      “It’s the only way.” Castiel raised his hand. Focusing all of his grace into his fingertips, and they all watched a bright blue ball of energy form in the palm of Castiel’s hand, then launch toward the Beast, growing in size as it did and trailing near-blinding streaks of light behind it that made Sam and Dean cover their eyes as the light swallowed the Beast whole. It imploded like a star, leaving nothing behind but a neat pile of ash.

       Lying on the ground, Castiel felt his energy fading, the light dimming in front of his eyes and erasing the concerned faces of his friends that he could see hovering above him. He heard a voice calling “Cas? Cas!” but he couldn’t connect it to a face; he couldn’t see more than faint blurs of color, and the voice was distorted as if someone was speaking to him from another room. Then everything went dark.

       Now, as he rose to his feet and began to feel his way through the darkness, Castiel sensed that something was different. The last time he’d been here, he’d heard a distant voice – the one that had turned out to be Jack’s – calling his name. This time, he didn’t hear anything. He had the sense that what had awakened him was a _feeling_ – he was feeling it now, a kind of pull, as if a string were tied to something inside him and being tugged toward a horizon he couldn’t see through the unrelenting dark.

       The first time, he had wandered, lost, searching his surroundings, but this time he moved with purpose, on a path he felt powerless to deviate from. He walked on through the dark until, suddenly, it wasn’t dark anymore.

       The crack appeared the way the first light of dawn does: so slowly and faintly, at first it seems like a trick of the eyes. But as they adjusted, the light condensed into a visible line, still far off in his field of vision but defined enough that he began to comprehend what he was seeing. It wasn’t like the rifts that opened between the worlds on Earth; this crack was fixed, like a crack in a plaster wall. The glow coming from it was dull, gray-blue, a swampy twilight. It was hard to gauge how big it was, or how far away. At the point at which Castiel first discerned that the crack was, in fact, a crack, it seemed wide enough to put his fingers in; several paces later, it seemed wide enough to fit his arm. Perhaps by the time he reached it he’d find it could swallow whole cities.

       He reached out an arm, slowly, wondering if he was close enough to feel it. His fingertips touched only air, but the glow was enough now that he could see his hand in front of his face. As he lowered his arm and stepped forward again, he sensed a presence behind him. He half expected to see his own face if he turned, the same creature he’d met on his last stay here. He shuddered at the thought. There is just something so unsettling about looking into your own face, even when it’s a face you’ve technically borrowed from someone else. Before he could turn around, he heard a voice: a honeyed contralto singing _There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in._

       It wasn’t the creature’s voice, but it was familiar. “You,” he breathed.


	2. Chapter 2

She hadn’t been able to get very far. It was an immediate realization, that she wouldn’t be able to, once she’d stopped falling and hit the ground in this strange place. She’d tried to stand, but her legs had immediately given out. “Seriously?” she muttered under her breath, rubbing a bruised hip. If this was the afterlife, weren’t bodies supposed to repair themselves or something? She hadn’t given much thought to the concept of afterlives on account of not expecting to have one. At least, not an _after-_ afterlife. She’d been sent back to Hell enough times, where death was a part of routine, where you died every day just to be brought back whole and killed again, but she’d always figured if you died topside, that was the end.

     As she lay there in the greenish, silty soil she had fallen onto, a piercing pain started to spread between her temples. _I’ve been to Hell? What kind of random thought is that?_ she thought to herself, but almost as soon as she’d forgotten why she’d had the thought, she forgot that she’d had it at all: the memories smoothed out of her brain like wrinkles out of a sheet until the only thing she could remember was being asleep. It felt like she’d been asleep for years, somewhere completely dark and quiet. And then she fell.

     She may not have known who or where she was, but she knew this place didn’t feel safe. There was just something ominous about it; memories or no, something in her bones told her that.

     Everything here moved like it was underwater, even the light and the sound waves. All of the light was murky and touched down in wavy, refracted lines. Everything looked dull gray or dull green or dull blue. Through the trees, she could hear what sounded like a flute playing, haunting and melancholy, but the sound was distorted as if it came from inside her ears rather than out.

     Since walking clearly wasn’t going to be an option, she figured the first thing she needed to worry about was shelter. Between the strange music and the light of peat fires filtering through the branches, she could tell she wasn’t alone. She had no way of knowing whether the someones or somethings there with her were friendly, so she felt it best to arm herself.

     She crawled over to a tree with a tangle of low-hanging brush; from the pile, she pulled the thickest branches she could find and began to build herself a fortress beneath the tree. It was hard work, especially from a seated position, but slowly the knotty limbs started to take shape into something that seemed practical to take cover inside. Once she had her shelter – what seemed like days later, though it was hard to gauge the passing of time in this place where the light never changed – she began to gather thinner sticks, pointed rocks, the skulls of small animals. She spent her time sharpening them into weapons, lashing spearheads to staffs with vines from the tree. She kept one eye always at the opening to her fortress. She didn’t know why she didn’t sleep.

     Intermittently, in the distance, she heard voices and sounds, some of them possibly human, some of them definitely not. She kept watch from inside, peering through the gaps in the branches into the neverending twilight as she tried to remember who she was and how she got there, wherever she was. The time and the noises and the movements in the dusky light blurred together until she heard a sound much closer to her, a snapping of twigs under what sounded very much like human boots, but she’d figured out already that she could never be sure. There seemed to be all kinds of things here. She readied a spear she’d made. A moment later, she heard a solid _thud_ in the sandy ground, then a grunt and a series of curses in a voice that definitely sounded human. And male. And Southern.

     With her spear raised, she crawled out of her shelter. Tangled in the snare she’d laid outside her makeshift doorway was what seemed to be a man, muscular and bearded, red-faced with anger. When he saw her, his expression softened, and he lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Darlin’, if you’re plannin’ to cook me, I don’t suppose I’ll taste very good,” he said.

     “I don’t…” she shook her head. She wasn’t sure how many days had passed, but she knew it had been days. She hadn’t felt a single hunger pang or craving in all that time. “I don’t think I… eat.” She held out the hand that wasn’t holding the spear, turning it over in front of her face, examining it. “What am I?” she said, not sure whether she was speaking to the man or to herself. “What is this place?”

     “The first question, I can’t answer,” the man said. “As for the second, well…” he glanced around, then came back to her face. “What I know is, they call this place the Underneath. Don’t seem to be any particulars to who end up here, but I have figured out that everything you see here…” he looked around again, more pointedly this time, “…is only here because you remember it.”

     She felt her hand slacken, so much she nearly dropped the spear. “I don’t remember anything.”

     “Well, there’s also the memories of whoever’s around you.” He pointed through the tangled trees toward a weathered shotgun shack she hadn’t noticed before. In fact, she could have sworn it hadn’t been there at all, had materialized out of the mist just then. “Like that house there, that’s mine. But this tree-” he pointed up at the towering cottonwood above her shoulder “-unless there’s somebody else here with us, that’s yours.”

     She looked up, following the gnarled gray trunk to the oblong golden leaves dancing in a thin ray of sunlight that was somehow penetrating the murky atmosphere. “I don’t remember it,” she said, but as she spoke, something lodged uncomfortably in the back of her brain, a muddy familiarity she couldn’t manage to tie to anything solid. It seemed she _remembered_ it; she just didn’t _remember_ remembering.

     “How do _you_ remember?” she asked.

     “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m supposed to. I just concentrated on it and things started comin’ back.”

     She lay a hand on the back of his arm where thick hairs bristled on deeply tanned skin beneath the rolled-up sleeves of a flannel shirt. “Can you teach me?”

     He smiled. “I reckon I can try.” With the other arm, he extended a hand, and she lifted hers off his arm to shake it. “Benjamin Lafitte,” he said. “You can call me Benny.”

     “I’m…” she bit her lip in frustration. “I don’t know.” She tipped her face up to those spearhead-shaped cottonwood leaves dancing around the sticky pods, where the dull ache of memory had crept into the back of her mind. Something was calling her there. The more intently she concentrated, the more aware she became that it was literally _calling_ her, a repeating syllable that slowly took the shape of a name. Still holding Benny’s hand, she turned to face him again. “Meg,” she said. “I think my name is Meg.”


	3. Chapter 3

     “You were expecting someone else?”

     “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” Castiel said honestly. “But I definitely wasn’t expecting you.”

     “Because you killed me?”

     He looked down at his hands. “Well, yes…”

     Billie adjusted her hood with a wry smile. “Turns out, there was an opening for a horseman,” she said.

     Castiel’s eyes followed the length of her arm to the scythe in her hand. His eyes widened. “Are you here to…”

     “What? Kill you?” Billie laughed. “Castiel, you’ve been here before. You should know as well I do that you’re already dead.”

     “But I shouldn’t be awake. He said all the angels and all the demons-”

     “Sleep forever, I know. Tell me, Castiel. This _him_ you speak of.” The expression on Billie’s face told Castiel that she knew exactly who he was referring to. “Do you remember anything else he told you?”

     “I- I’m not sure…”

     Billie went on as if she hadn’t heard him, as if his answer wasn’t even important. “Do you know what these are?” she asked, gesturing toward the crack and, glittering in the distance beyond it, several more that were either smaller or farther away or both.

     Castiel hesitated. The answer seemed too easy.

     “It’s not a trick question,” Billie said.

     “They’re cracks?”

     “Cracks,” Bilie repeated, as if she were saying something completely different. She moved closer to the big one, which Castiel could now see opened only a few feet away from them. “You’re familiar with the expression ‘falling through the cracks’?” He nodded. “This is where that comes from. Certain events – catastrophic events, events that were never meant to happen – open up these cracks. And sometimes the souls lost enough to end up here-” she gestured around the bleak expanse of the Empty – “slip through the cracks and end up… there.”

     Something about the way she said it made Castiel shiver. “Where is _there_?”

     “The Underneath. It’s not technically a place. Think of it as a sort of annex to the Empty. Or… a closet. It’s really just empty space, like here. Only things don’t sleep there. And minds can’t handle the void, so they fill it.”

     “Fill it with what?”

     “Memories, mostly. Pieces of dreams. Stories they’ve heard, the way they imagined them.”

     “I feel like it’s calling me,” Castiel said, “the crack. Am I slipping through?”

     “You’re not slipping. Someone already fell through.”

     “Who?”

     Billie shook her head. “Even I can’t tell you that. What I can tell you is, you have a tether. I can feel it.”

     “A tether?”

     “A primal link. A cosmic connection. There is someone on the other side of that wall who’s attached to you. In every sense of the word.” She smiled without warmth. “That’s what’s pulling you. Someone’s tugging the other end of the thread.”

     Castiel stared, uncomprehending.

     “What else did _he_ say to you?” Billie repeated.

     Suddenly, he remembered. The creature wearing his own face, sneering at him in a strange high voice. _I know who you love. There’s nothing back there for you._ At the time, he’d been confused. Sam and Dean were back there, and he loved them as much as he thought possible. They were his family.

     But now, slowly, he understood. The creature had been talking about someone else, about a different kind of love. Suddenly, it seemed palpable. Her small but strong frame pressed against his body. The smell of her hair, a soft thorny tangle under his chin, like the smell of freshly struck matches. He breathed her name out loud. “Meg.” He felt his jaws slack, his brow knit. “She’s…?”

     “You didn’t know.” It wasn’t a question, but there was surprise in Billie’s face.

     “I didn’t… I would have…” Castiel stumbled over his words, too many thoughts swimming in front of his eyes to catch the right ones. “How long?” he asked, finally.

     “Five years,” she said. “Since the night you stole the angel tablet from the crypt.”

     Castiel felt a slow heat creep up the back of his neck, his feelings of shock and grief momentarily displaced by memories of the other significance of that night, his fears that somehow, with her newfound powers, she knew.

     He’d never told anyone about it. Even before he’d known he wouldn’t see Meg again, it had felt like a memory he should hold close, keep for just himself: how they’d piled into the car, him and her in the back seat. The warmth and friction of their bodies wedged together as the Impala flew over bumpy back roads. The look on her face when she’d draped one of her legs between his – that half-smile and slightly raised eyebrow that always gave him a funny twisting feeling somewhere below his navel.

     When Dean had parked in a desolate industrial area and ordered them to stay in the car. As he and Sam climbed out, Meg had run a single finger up the leg closest to her. “We’ve got time,” she’d said. “I’ve been on a supply run with them before. It’ll be dark before they get back here.”

     “Time? For what?”

     Meg’s eyebrow hitched higher. Finally, Castiel understood. His eyes darted around the butter-yellow interior of the Impala. “Here?”

     “Why not? You know Merry and Pippin have rubbed their junk all over this upholstery. Probably not at the same time, but then again… they’re close.” Castiel squinted, and Meg laughed. “Never mind,” she said. “Just come here.” She cupped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him down to kiss her, leaning back on the bench seat until she was lying down and his weight shifted on top of her.

     That was the memory he kept clutched tight to his chest: her jeans tugged off, his trousers opened and pushed down to his thighs. The taste of her mouth as he kissed her, a swirling darkness he’d tasted before, and then a new taste lower down, stronger and wilder. The feeling of her thighs around his neck, and then around his waist; her fingernails biting into his back as she murmured instructions into his ear. The way it felt to move against her, to move inside her, the sensations that jolted through his body, the way she said “Clarence,” right before everything in his body exploded and how the name wasn’t enough to hold the shaking in her body, how Meg had arched her back and screamed “Castiel!” into the ceiling of the car as the whole interior swirled with black smoke and blue light, twining together and shooting off sparks like fireworks. How the last traces were still dissipating as Castiel and Meg straightened their clothes and scooted to opposite corners of the backseat, trying their best to look innocent when Sam and Dean opened the front doors and slide back into their seats.

     The brothers had cut their eyes at them, clearly suspicious that _something_ was up, but with an already challenging night ahead of them, they didn’t press the issue. As the car peeled out, Meg had reached over across the darkness and squeezed Castiel’s knee and he’d looked into her face, seen the laughter in her eyes, like they shared a secret. He’d wanted to run away with her right then.

     But that wasn’t what had happened. They’d split up, and he’d gone to the crypts to retrieve the tablet, and he hadn’t seen her again. He’d always thought he would, even after all this time – that someday she would pop back into their lives like she always did, like nothing had happened at all. When doubts did creep in, they were always fears that maybe she was upset about what had happened in the car; maybe she didn’t want to see him again. It was only this that stopped him every time he thought of trying to find her: it just wouldn’t be respectful, he thought, if she didn’t _want_ to be found.

     “Take my hand,” Billie said, snapping Castiel back to the deep nothingness of the Empty. He regarded her extended palm, blue around the edges from the glow coming through the crack. “You need to see it,” she said. Slowly, he placed his hand in hers. As her did, her face flickered into view: his Meg.

     “Go,” Meg was saying. “Save your brother. And my unicorn.”

     “Her unicorn?” Castiel blinked. “What does that mean, her unicorn?”

     Billie sighed. “It means someone you love enough that it changes you.”

     “Who is she talking about? Who was that to her?”

     “Castiel, you can’t honestly be that thick. It’s you. Obviously it’s you.”

     “Then… she was my unicorn, too.”

     Billie tapped her foot and exhaled. “Yes, Castiel. Like I said. You’re tethered.” She squeezed his hand, directing his attention back to where it rested on hers. “Keep watching.”

     Castiel focused again on the image of the demon he had, against all his better judgment, loved. He watched as the angel blades were drawn; watched Crowley’s blade pierce her flesh, saw her fall. He didn’t realize he was falling too until he landed on his knees, the word _no_ frozen in his throat. “I should have stayed there with her,” he murmured finally, staring down at his hands. Standing above him, Billie still held hers outstretched, but the connection was broken. Except for the light from the crack, the Empty was dark again. “I could have protected her.”

     “Or you could have died too, and lost the angel tablet to the king of Hell,” Billie said, her tone not unsympathetic.

     “Forget the tablet,” he said. “What good did it do? Nothing’s fixed. And I lost her.” He watched the way the gray-blue light rippled across his knees, like light under water. He followed a thin light stream to where it trailed down the wall below the crack. With his fingertip, he traced the light up to where the horizon broke open, rising slowly to his feet as he did. He could feel it now: an energy pulsing from the rift, a shift in atmosphere making it clear that the other side was another place.

     He turned to face Billie. “She’s there,” he said. “That’s why I feel pulled to this place. That tether you talked about. Meg is there.”

     “She is,” Billie said. Castiel sensed a hesitancy in her voice.

     “But…”

“But,” Billie said pointedly, “the Underneath is not a place you come back from.”

     “That’s what you said about the Empty.”

     “The Underneath is not a place you come back from,” Billie repeated, as if she hadn’t heard him, “because the Underneath is not a _place._ Here, there are rules. There, it’s whatever the mind fills in the blanks with. You can die there. Really die, not like you and your friends. Things in the Underneath are unaccounted for. If you die there, you don’t _go_ anywhere. You just…” she pressed her lips together into a thin line. “Poof. Cease to exist.”

     “Then I need to go and get Meg before that happens.” His hands clenched into fists at his sides as he stared at the glowing gap.

     Billie laughed a dry laugh. “I see why they made you an honorary Winchester,” she said. “Always taking risks your body can’t hold. This is one you really might not come back from.”

     “I won’t leave her there,” Castiel growled, his right hand moving to the hilt of his angel blade. “I won’t leave her. Not ever again.”

     Billie just smiled. “All right, all right,” she said. “Calm down, Feathers.”

     Castiel scowled, but slowly removed his hand from the blade.

     “But,” Billie went on, “like your little friends back there, you have unfinished business. That’s why I came here for you. And if you insist upon throwing yourself into a lawless void,” she sighed deeply, crossing her arms over her chest, “I’m going with you. I have to at least _try_ to protect you.” With the tip of her scythe, she hooked the edge of the crack and pulled down, widening it into an opening big enough for them to duck and climb through. Castiel couldn’t see the ground on the other side, so he braced himself for a fall, but the drop was only a few feet. The ground he landed on felt solid but pliable at the same time, shifting, like sand. The light looked like underwater light, just like the rays that had filtered through the crack in the Empty. He didn’t _feel_ like he was in water, but all around him objects swirled through the air as if they were awash.

     “Here we are,” said Billie’s voice behind him as the gap she’d made from the crack closed again. “This is what you wanted. What are you going to do now?”


	4. Chapter 4

     It was slow going at first. Benny stayed with Meg in her shelter, helping her learn to see the way he did. “It ain’t something’ you can really control,” he said as they sat cross-legged on the shelter’s sandy floor. “It’s more like, you see to remember, not remember to see. Y’understand?” Meg shook her head. “Your eyes make the memories,” he explained, “then your brain understands them. Some of this stuff out here might be yours.” He gestured at the expanse outside the shelter. “You just have to learn how to recognize it.”

     Meg crawled to the opening and stared out at the jumbled landscape. For the first time, she noticed two things. One was that there were things everywhere that didn’t make sense next to each other: a moss-draped shotgun shack with a beached schooner in the front yard, an old-fashioned lamppost half-submerged in a swamp.

     The other thing she noticed was that the view was always changing. In subtle shifts, items slowly appearing and disappearing in the distance. As a barn winked out of sight somewhere through the trees, Meg became aware of the rusty end of an old car poking through the brush. It stirred something inside her, like the feeling she’d had when she’d heard her name. She had an itchy sense that, even though she couldn’t place it, the car belonged to her memory.

     “There,” she said, pointing at it. “We need to go there.”

     “Why?”

     “I don’t know. I just feel it.”

     She felt a bit ridiculous being carried across the the sand on Benny’s back, but she still couldn’t stand well and knew she’d fall if she tried to walk. He’d hoisted her up so easily and without complaint, and she could feel the muscles rippling in his shoulders as she held on to his neck.

     They ducked around the branches obscuring most of the car, and the light dimmed, prickly boughs cutting jigsaw shadows into the sky. Little flecks of light floated through, but they were blurred, indistinct, and Meg couldn’t tell if they were fireflies or sparks. Maybe they were stars remembered by someone who couldn’t remember what stars looked like.

     When they broke into the clearing where Meg had seen the car, it took shape, along with a dozen other broken-down vehicles and a garage, in the shadow of a decaying house. Seeing a pickup truck with a length of rope tied to the side, the end hanging loose in the truck bed, Meg stiffened.

     “What is it, love?” Benny asked.

     “Set me down?”

     Benny nodded and lowered Meg to the ledge formed by the truck’s dropped tailgate. Meg stared at her hands. “I think I killed a dog here,” she said. “I mean, the real version of this place. In the real world. But it’s strange. I have this, like, sort of flash. Like a memory, I guess, but I memory I can’t _remember_ remembering.”

     “That’s how it starts.”

     “Does this happen for everyone?”

     He shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen. Most of them seem to have forgotten everything. Who they are, what the stuff is they’re seein’ – everything.”

     “The others,” Meg said slowly. “Have you met a lot of people here?”

     “No,” Benny paused. “I would not call most of ‘em people.”

     Meg looked back down at her hands. “I don’t remember touching it,” she said. “The dog. In the memory – if that’s what it is – I just sort of…” she lifted one hand and clenched it into a fist. “And all its bones cracked, like I think its spine snapped. And it fell down. Dead.” She lowered the hand back into her lap, turning it over, studying her skin. “Am I bad person?” she asked. “Am I a person at all?”

     “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll come back to you. But bad’s never all there is to somebody. I can tell you that much.”

     Meg turned her head and stared into the garage, its contents obscured by shadows. “This place is creeping me out,” she said, rubbing her hands against shivering shoulders. “Why is this what I remember?”

     “From what I can figure,” Benny said, “the memories here aren’t good or bad, necessarily, they just _are._ They’re just random pieces of you.”

     “I don’t think I like this one.”

     “Well, I know for sure that one’s mine,” Benny said, pointing through the woods at the old shotgun shack. There was no longer a boat in the yard; it had been replaced by an old-fashioned streetcar, no less out of place in the small swept-dirt courtyard. Meg supposed that whomever – or whatever – had remembered the boat had moved on, or… she shuddered. She didn’t want to think of the alternative. She focused instead on the dancing yellow lamplight glowing from the porch; how welcoming it looked, even if it was the only thing in this place that did.

     Without protest, Meg let Benny scoop her into his arms and carry her to the house. “At least it’s safe here,” he said as he opened the door. “We can rest a while.”

     She let him tuck her into a brass daybed under a thick quilt. As he lowered her, she felt his hands on the scar tissue near the base of her spine and stiffened reflexively, even though her brain knew he was just trying to help her. She saw a look of alarm flash across his face, and he quickly settled her into the cushions and withdrew his hands. “It’s ok,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just… a little jumpy around that spot.”

     Benny shoved his hands in his pockets. “Do you mind me askin’ what happened?”

     Meg pressed a hand against the scar, snaked the other around her front to just below her navel where a corresponding gnarl of flesh lay fused to her skin. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I was in an accident?” Her voice trailed off, unsure, like she was asking instead of answering. She could hear it and she hated it. But she really didn’t know.

     She lay under the quilt and watched Benny kindle a woodfire in the pot-bellied stove. When he’d finished, he sat cross-legged on a hooked-rag rug on the floor next to her. He reached out and took her hand. “I know you don’t need to, but I’m gonna have to get some rest soon,” he said. “Try to remember. Anything. Concentrate hard, and you’ll see the pieces come back.”

     Meg pressed her eyes closed tightly, but all she saw was blackness, dotted with tiny sparks of light from the pressure of her eyelids. She sighed and sank into the cushions as he retired to the bedroom at the back of the house. As she traced her scars, she noticed a strange mark on her arm – a red circle with a line through it, like a tattoo or a brand. “How did I get this?” she murmured out loud.

     She closed her eyes again and tried to focus. Nothing. For a long time, nothing. Just the creaking of the tin roof above her and the smell of the soot and smoke from the stove. Then, slowly, another smell began to creep in – a sharp, bitter antiseptic smell. A smell that didn’t belong in the cabin. She was tempted to open her eyes, see where it was coming from, but she squeezed them closed tighter and leaned into it instead. A bright light blossomed in the center of Meg’s vision, stretching out to the corners until the dark was all gone, replaced by a brilliant white that Meg slowly discerned as a corridor.

     The floor was white linoleum, the walls white tile and plaster. Fluorescent bulbs suspended from steel cables illuminated the hall. As Meg moved down it – _walking,_ she noticed, which felt strange and alien to her now – the bulbs began to burst, one by one down the row, shattering into a rain of glass and sparks. As they did, she heard a sound swelling in her ears, an unearthly shriek that quickly became unbearable. As the decibels rose, she covered her ears and dropped to her knees on the white linoleum, cringing from the pain. Then, just as quickly as it had mounted inside her, the pain dissipated and the sound waves coalesced into a voice – a voice that was calling her name.

_Meg! Meg, help me!_

     She crawled toward the voice, then remembered that her legs worked and jumped to them, running down the sterile white hall. Without her willing it to, her voice cried out, “Clarence?”

     Her eyes snapped open. She was still on the daybed in the front room of Benny’s shotgun house, but she realized, she had shouted the name out loud. It hung in the air between them as Benny rushed out of the back bedroom to see what was wrong.

     “Who’s Clarence?” he asked.

     “I don’t know.” Meg pulled her knees up to her chest under the quilt. “I had this… thing. Like a dream, except I wasn’t sleeping. Or… a vision. It was like I was _there_ , though. I was moving and talking but I had no control over what I did, what I said… it was like I was just riding around inside my own body.”

      Benny nodded. “Sounds like a memory.”

     “Are all your memories… like _that_?”

     “Here, they are.”

     Meg rubbed her temples. “I don’t know if I can take it.”

     “What choice do you have? There is no choice, darlin’. Only other choice is forgetting. And when you forget here, you forget _everything_. You forget who you are.”

     “But I already don’t know who I am!”

     “But you haven’t forgotten _that_ you are. The ones here who forget, well, they forget they even exist. They forget everything about them that makes them who they are. And then they become nothing. Everything that was a part of them goes away.”

     Meg thought about the times she’d seen houses and cars and trees vanish from the landscape, and a chill ran through her bones.

     As if he could see her thoughts, Benny said, “You can fight it. You can. You just got to…” he trailed off, and Meg followed his gaze to what had caught his attention. Outside the cabin’s window, rising into the dark sky, was a huge and somewhat foreboding hospital tower. “Well,” Benny said. “That’s new.”


	5. Chapter 5

     “What a strange place this is,” Castiel mused, resting his hand on the flank of a carousel horse; the carousel, with its bright carnival lights and calliope sounds, sat improbably in front of the steps to a small clapboard church.

     “I told you, it’s not a place,” Billie said. “It’s a void. Filled, temporarily, with the memories of the lost. Eventually, those memories will disintegrate, and then so will they.”

     “Who is here?”

     “Everyone. I mean, everyone who falls through the cracks. The Empty is full of angels, demons, monsters who get killed in Purgatory… the occasional human soul who gets banished from Heaven or Hell, or just ended up here by mistake. A crack opens in the fabric… anything there can fall through.”

     “And it’s dangerous.” It was half a question, but he spoke it like a statement. He was fairly sure he knew the answer.

     “It is, but not in the way you think. The others here, they won’t hurt you. They’re locked inside their own heads for the most part.”

     “You said I could die here.”

     “That was an oversimplification.” Billie sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Here, death is forgetting. On Earth, you die twice. The first time is when your body dies. The second is when the last person who remembered you dies or forgets. Here in the Underneath, the only person who remembers you is _you._ So when you forget yourself, that’s when…” she made the same motion she’d made back in the Empty. “Poof.”

     “But I remember her. I remember Meg.”

     “That won’t be enough to save her. Not if she gives in to it.”

     “She’s strong,” Castiel said. “I’ve never seen her give in to anything.”

     “Well. That’s optimistic.” As they stood there, the church behind them slowly faded, so slowly in fact that at first Castiel thought it was a trick his eyes were playing on him, just the light shifting on the weathered wood. But soon enough the walls became transparent and he could see the old piano and the rows of pews, then those too disappeared and there was only bare ground. “Whoever remembered that church is gone now,” Billie said.

     They let a moment of silence pass between them, like a ghost drifting past to the edge of the void. Finally, as they moved on, it occurred to Castiel to ask why he still had his own memories.

     “I’m protecting you,” Billie said. “There’s a way I can kind of get my claws in your brain and pull from inside. But we don’t have much time. I can’t hold on like this for long.”

     “Why are you doing this? Why would you protect me?”

     She sighed. “Because I need the Winchesters. And they need you. Now let’s move before I lose my grip.”

     “Can’t I just remember Meg, and bring her to us?”

     “It doesn’t work that way. You remember what your mind wants to. You have to let the memories lead you.” She was already moving across the murky soil, so Castiel followed her. They passed a school bus, a military outpost, a high-rise office building with walls like mirrored glass. None of it made sense together, and here and there they would see things disappear. Sometimes they’d be replaced by something new; leave behind a vacant space. “Look around you. Is any of this yours?”

     “I… I don’t think…” As he turned his head, something finally caught his eye: a small square of a park with an ornate stone bench. “This,” he said. “I remember this.”

     He sat down on the bench, feeling the cold of the stone through his dress trousers. “But this isn’t right,” he said. “This memory. It was from another time and place. One… before her. She was never here.” He stared up at Billie, hands folded across his knees.

     Something in Billie’s face softened, and she slid into the space beside him. “There’s a reason your mind brought this up,” she said, as the shadow of a kite sailed over their heads. “I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry it’s not what you want.”

     Castiel lowered his head. He was about to let his eyes close when he noticed something: a glint of light through the brush at the edge of the park, that underwatery sunlight bouncing off a rusting car’s taillight. He jumped to his feet and followed it, pushing aside branches carelessly, letting scratches mar his arms and cheeks. Billie followed closely behind, calling out to him, but Castiel ignored her, singularly focused on breaking through the bramble. Finally, they burst into a clearing, facing a building that Castiel definitely recognized. “This is Bobby Singer’s place,” he said, looking over the rows of twisted car bodies, the boarded-up windows of the dilapidated house beyond.

     “So you’ve been here before.”

     “I have, but…” Castiel’s brow furrowed as he continued to look around. “This isn’t right.”

     “That was never there.” He pointed at a mostly-dismantled Plymouth near the side steps to the house. When he’d been there, there was only a single front fender leaning against the side wall, the rest of the car long gone. He redirected his pointing finger in the direction of the front porch, which, unlike when he’d been there, was empty. “There were always old car seats there,” he said. “Bench seats. He used them like couches.”

     An old pickup truck with faded powder blue paint caught his eye; he’d never seen it before either. He made he way over to it. There was a chain hanging from it, trailing across the truck bed to where it attached to an empty dog collar. Castiel lifted it, the chain clanking against the steel of the bed. He turned it over in his hands. Judging by the fresh hairs still clinging to the worn leather of the collar, the absent dog hadn’t been gone long. “Bobby didn’t have a dog,” he said.

     “Maybe it’s not your memory,” Billie said softly.

     As the weight of what her words meant settled on him, his fingers loosened their grip on the collar and he dropped it into the dead grass beneath the truck. His eyes followed it down, and nestled in the weeds beside it was something _very_ familiar, something he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen right away: a charm necklace on a broken cord. He scooped it up and held it close to his heart.

     “That was hers, wasn’t it?” Billie said. “She was here.”

     Castiel nodded, gazing up at the finger of gray smoke trailing from a bent metal chimney mounted in a corner of the rooftop. The smoke dissipated into the air like it was being erased. Then, as they watched, so did the chimney itself.”

     “You’re losing her.” It was a simple statement, spoken as if she were observing the weather.

     On the edge of the horizon, just beyond where the chimney used to be, Castiel could see a crack spreading across the sky, just like the one they’d climbed through. Maybe it was the same one.  “Billie,” he said, “what made the crack?”

     Billie stared at him. “You did,” she said. She reached over and took his hand. As she did, his vision clouded and instead of the salvage yard, he saw the backseat of the Impala, his skin again Meg’s, the sea of tiny and brilliant sparks that had seemed to explode all around them. At first he didn’t understand. Then, suddenly, he did.

     “But it’s been years,” he said.

     “It’s been sleeping inside her. All these years that she’s been in the Empty. Now that she’s awake, soon your child will be too.” Castiel followed her eyes to the corner of the roof where the chimney had been, and together they watched the whole corner crumble into dust and disappear. “If,” she said finally, “there’s anything left of them.”


	6. Chapter 6

     The hospital was tall and white, all of its blank windows gaping at them like a wall of eyes. It somehow both chilled and excited Meg. There was something incredibly familiar about it. She was sure there were important pieces of her somewhere in there. “I need to go there,” she told Benny. “I just know it’s mine.”

     He nodded. “Then we’ll go.”

     She thought of how they’d have to manage it, probably with Benny carrying her again, and felt a twinge of something like guilt. “Can I ask you something?” she said. Another nod. “Why are you doing all this for me?”

     Benny shoved his hands in his pockets, shuffled his feet on the rug. It was the first time Meg had seen him move with anything other than purpose and confidence. “Someone… did me a kindness once. I felt I owed it to ‘em to pass that on.”

     “Well. Thanks.” Meg lifted the quilt off her legs and let her body turn to liquid, sliding onto the floor so that she could crawl to the window. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Benny move to help her, but she shook her head. He kept a respectful distance but still moved to join her when she reached the pane and shakily pulled herself up to lean against it and look through.

     Once she could see it clearly, there was no mistaking the hospital for anything but her own memory. The light from the windows gave her flashes of her own feet moving down that glaring white hallway in her dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream. As she faded back into reality – or the closest approximation of reality she had, the living room of a house from someone else’s memory – she became aware that Benny’s fingers were resting softly on top of hers.

     She turned toward him and felt her face moving toward his, almost involuntarily, like gravity. At the same time, his was moving toward hers. Just as her lips were about to graze his, she felt something twist in her stomach, an awful, anxious feeling, and she pulled away.

     “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t feel right.”

     Benny nodded. “I feel like I shouldn’t, anyway,” he said. “There’s someone, isn’t there?”

     “I think so. I can’t remember, but I can _feel_ it, you know? I feel something inside of me.” She clasped her hands to her belly that still wouldn’t quiet. “I feel _different._ ”

     Benny gave her a knowing look, a sort of sideways glance that infuriated her. “What?” she snapped.

     “Just a hunch,” he said. “I think you may be more different than you know.” He turned toward the hallway. “We’ll go to the hospital in the morning,” he said, and retreated once again to the bedroom.

     Getting through the night was hard. Meg had pulled herself back into the daybed but despite its comforts she still had no urge to sleep. Finally, a kind of light settled over the air outside the window – still muddled and dim, but enough lighter that the contrast between the horizon and the bright yellow squares of light in the hospital’s uncountable windows grew less stark.

     Benny emerged from the back of the house, packing supplies into a rucksack. “Do we really need all that?” Meg asked.

     “That hospital might be farther than it looks. Things around here usually are.”

     With the bag slung across Meg’s back and Meg slung across Benny’s, they slowly made their way down the porch steps and the steep hill behind the house. Benny had been right; even though it had looked from the windows as if the hospital was right outside, now she could see that the hill was long and the terrain rough, growing steadily rougher as trees and bramble rose around them while they pressed on. “Come _on_!” Meg yelled as a thick tangle of thorns sprang up to block their path. “Who would remember this?”

     “It’s not always a choice, remember?” Benny said as he lowered Meg’s body onto a flat rock so that they could rest. “This ain’t Heaven. You don’t always get your best memories.” He pulled a Thermos out of the bag and handed it to Meg. “Anyway, you never know. That could _be_ somebody’s idea of Heaven.”

     Meg shrugged and unscrewed the cap of the Thermos. She took a gulp of the icy water and grimaced. “Wish you had some whiskey in there.”

     Benny shot her a sly grin as he pulled out a tiny flask and wiggled it between his fingers in the air in front of her. Meg reached out and snatched for it, but Benny suddenly hesitated and pulled the flask back, leaving Meg to close her fist around nothing but air. “What did you do that for?” she demanded.

     “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

     “Well, why the Hell not?”

     Benny looked down. “I’m not sure it’s my place to say.”

     “You better make it your place.” Meg’s free hand, still closed in a fist, clenched tighter at her side. “You’re being mysterious as all Hell and I don’t like it. What’s the big secret you don’t wanna tell me? Spit it out or I’m gonna wrestle that bottle out of your big bear paws.”

     Benny set the flask down on the rock and sighed. “All this time I been carryin’ you,” he said, “I think you been carryin’ someone too.”

     Meg’s fist unballed at the same time that her other hand dropped the Thermos, and it rolled down into the thicket while Meg’s hands flew to her belly. “No.”

     “You feel it, don’t you?”

     Meg nodded. “What do I do? I don’t know who this kid is. I don’t even know who _I_ am. And I feel like I’m forgetting more and more.” She looked up at the windows of the hospital in front of them. Now that they were closer, there was no mistaking the truth. The light in the windows wasn’t fading because it was morning; it was fading because whatever was behind the glass was slowly blending into nothing. She was forgetting.

     “It’s going,” she said softly.

     “Then we have to get inside.” Benny shoved whatever was close enough to grab quickly back into the bag, leaving the rest. He tossed the bag to Meg and scooped her into his arms as soon as she’d caught it, running down the hill and breaking through the brush standing between them and the hospital. Meg threw her arms up to shield her face from the thorns, then realized doing so left her belly unprotected so she lowered them again. In a moment, it was all over anyway, and they were bursting onto the hospital lawn, which they crossed even faster.

     She was surprised to find that there was no resistance to them entering the building; the glass front doors swung easily open to let them onto the wide tile hallway. The tiles beneath Benny’s feet looked exactly the ones from Meg’s dream-that-wasn’t, but the walls were transparent in places. Where they were still solid, Meg could see black spots ringed with light, like the ones she saw behind her eyes when she squeezed them tightly shut, bloom and spread against the white plaster and tile. An abandoned wheelchair leaned against a wall, and Meg pointed to it. “Put me down in the chair,” she said, and Benny complied, taking the rucksack back from her and swinging it onto his own shoulders.

     At first, Benny pushed Meg down the aisles, but she soon got the hang of pushing her own rims and he let her handles go. They still raced, even though she had no idea where they were running to, or what they were running from. As they moved, the corridor seemed to crumble around them. Benny slammed the heel of his hand against a panel of buttons next to an elevator bank, and when one elevator’s doors creaked open, he pushed Meg into the steel cubicle and threw himself after her. As the doors closed, just before the floor beneath them lifted, Meg saw the entire wall opposite them fall away.

     Meg could see then that Benny had pressed every button on the inside panel of the elevator, lighting up all of the little glass numbered bubbles lining the wall. “I didn’t have a choice,” he said with an apologetic tone. “I didn’t know where we were goin’, but I knew we had to leave there while we still could.” The elevator rattled from one floor to the next, opening and then closing again on hall after hall of white tile and faded public health posters, Benny urging Meg each time to try her hardest to remember, was this floor the one where something important had happened. Meg shook her head mutely each time, and as the elevator rose again, another floor would collapse beneath them.

     When the light marked “13” blinked off and the doors opened, Meg put out her hand. There was something about this one that felt different. Wordlessly, Benny pushed her out before the elevator itself disappeared.

     As Meg rolled into the hallway, she noticed a sign on the wall that read _Department of Mental Health._ “Great,” she muttered. “Of all the places my brain could remember, it picks the psycho ward.” But the walls here were more solid, and the floor didn’t shift beneath her wheels the way it had on the other floors. It felt as though something was pulling her from deep in her gut, and she rolled toward the feeling.

     As she moved down the hallway, one by one, the light bulbs above her began to shatter. The bright white light of the hallway dimmed to gray as they burst. Meg thought she felt her whole body shaking, then she realized it was the walls. “What’s happening?” she yelled, gripping her wheels tightly as everything in the hallway vibrated through her.

     There was that unearthly, static screech again, and just like in her forgotten memory, the sounds compressed and took the shape of her own name. “Clarence,” she whispered. That name that made sense to her tongue but not to her brain.

     Slowly, she realized that Benny was staring at her. “What?”

     “Your eyes,” he said. “I know what you are.”

     Meg looked up, into the moon face of a convex mirror mounted in the corner of the hallway. For the first time in this place, she saw herself: a small-framed young woman with long blonde hair and a pretty heart-shaped face, with eyes that were completely black from corner to corner. “Dammit, more secrets!” she pounded her fists against the sides of her chair. “Why won’t you tell me anything?!”

     “There’s no time,” Benny said. “You’re in trouble.” He grabbed the push handles of Meg’s chair and sprinted down the hall, Meg flying ahead of him in her seat. “Which room?” he said as they skidded past rows of open doors. “Which one is yours? It’s got to be one of them.”

     “I-I don’t know,” Meg stammered. The doors all looked the same. The walls, even though they were sturdier than the ones on the floors below them, were beginning to fade. Finally they passed a door that gave Meg that funny feeling, stronger now, almost painful. “That one.” She pointed behind them. “In there.” 

     Benny backed up and threw them through the door. Inside, Meg could hear a tinny stream of rock music, a frenetic punk beat, but she couldn’t locate the source or make out the words. All of the light bulbs were broken, and in the near-darkness Meg couldn’t make out anything but a bed and a chair, both of them with iron frames covered in chipped white paint, both of them empty. A kind of blue light clung to the corners like a residue, but of what, she didn’t know.

     Benny lifted Meg onto the bed. “I feel funny,” she murmured as he lay her body across the mattress. “What’s wrong with me?” She felt weak. The twisting inside her was stronger than ever, more of a _pulling_ now. It felt like it was going to turn her inside out. “What’s wrong with me?”

     “You know,” Benny said. “Hold on.”

     And she did, and she did, and the far edges of the sheets clenched in her hands began to unravel into nothing.


	7. Chapter 7

     Castiel didn’t recognize the moss-covered house or the trolley wedged against the front porch, but when he saw the tall, flickering white hospital tower below the rise, his mind flooded with memories he hadn’t even realized he had. White walls. Bright lights. Chaos and confusion in his mind. Her kind brown eyes, her soft hands. Even in his psychic torment, that was when he’d known he loved her. There, in that tower. So then why…

     His brow furrowed. “I remember everything about that place,” he said. “I don’t understand. Why is it fading?” From where they stood, parts of the tower were translucent. He could see straight into the front lobby, a stand of pines appearing to grow right up through the floor.

     “That means it’s not your memory,” Billie said. “We’ve been over this.”

     “But I remember it. Exactly like that.”      “Well then,” Billie said, with the first hint of a smile Castiel had seen cross her face in some time, “You might still have a chance.”

     He stared at her. “You mean she’s there?”

     “For now. But from the looks of things, not for long.” She jerked her chin in the direction they’d come from; Castiel turned his head to see that the salvage yard had completely disappeared.

     He ran down the steep wooded hill, his coattails flapping behind him, Billie close on his heels. He’d never had the codes to open the hospital doors, but at this point it didn’t matter; he could walk right through the wall. He ducked between the trees to an empty front desk, the floor beneath his feet alternating between carpet and moss. Beyond it, where there should have been a bank of elevators, there was only a gaping hole.

     “You’re not going to get to her like that,” came Billie’s voice from behind him. “If you remember this place, then you _need_ to remember it. Now. Concentrate. Because it looks like she can’t hold it up anymore.” Her eyes traveled up to a wall above them, and together they watched as it crashed down in a waterfall of dust.

     Castiel closed his eyes and spread his arms out at his sides, tilting his head back, feeling the air move through his hair and his outstretched fingers. He tried to let the memories flow through him the same way: this room that he had to pass through each day on his way to the day room, its ugly but comfortable carpet that clashed with the wallpaper. How he’d walked across it in his white smock and padded socks, Meg in her blue nurse’s uniform holding his hand. As his mind pictured it, he felt it spread under his feet, evening out, replacing the patches of moss. He opened his eyes. The lobby was back, the way it had been when this hospital was his temporary home.

     Past the desk where there had only been holes in the plaster a few moments before were shiny elevator doors. He dropped his arms and dashed for them. “You have to keep focus,” Billie yelled inside the shaking cubicle. “If you stop, we lose all this.”

     Castiel nodded and clenched his jaw in concentration as he punched the button marked _13_. It glowed bright. The elevator ascended.

     When they stepped off onto the thirteenth floor, Castiel dug into his memories like he had in the lobby, and a mostly collapsed corridor built itself into a gleaming white ward. From down the hall, he heard a familiar voice crying out. Swirling from under a closed door in the direction of the screams were tendrils of black smoke and blue light, twisting and blurring together; the air smelled like freshly struck matches and sharp mint. Still, he was sure that even without the commotion he would have been drawn to that door. It had once been his.

 

__________

 

     Behind the door, Benny was tearing strips of sheets with his teeth. He’d never handled whatever Meg was bringing into the world, but he’d helped deliver a few babies in his time. He knew the basics, at least.

     “How is this happening now?!” Meg screamed. “I just found out, like, ten minutes ago!”

     Benny shook his head. “In my experience, some things grow faster than others. And I know what you are, but I don’t know what _that_ is. Ain’t no cambion, I’ve seen those born. This is something new to me.” Her twisting fingers slipped through the disintegrating fabric of the sheets like butter. “You gotta try to remember this place,” he said. “Hold on to it. Or you and whatever that child of yours is won’t survive to see it born.”

     “I can’t,” Meg sobbed. “I’m trying. I can’t.”

     “I don’t know this place,” Benny said. “I can’t help you hold it.”

     “But I can.” They turned in the direction of the voice, the door that had just swung open. The man with the intense blue eyes and the long coat, speaking. He gave Meg the same feeling the salvage yard and the hospital had given her, only much stronger. He was a place she’d been before.

     “You have to hold on,” he said in a low, gruff voice that vibrated through Meg’s bones. “Listen to me, Meg.” She fixed on his eyes. “I was here with you,” he said. “I remember. I need you to remember with me.”

     “Who am I?” she demanded. “ _What_ am I?”

     “You’re a demon.”

     She laughed. “Are you flirting? Because you’re really bad at it.”

     His brow crumpled in confusion. “No, I-” he stammered. He stepped forward to her bedside and took her hand. “Once, you reminded me who I was,” he said. “Now it’s my turn to do the same for you.”

     “And who are you?”

     “Castiel. I’m an angel of the Lord.” He paused. “You used to call me Clarence.”

     Benny looked between the two of them, his jaw slackening with realization. “I saw a lot of things in Purgatory,” he said, shaking his head, “But I never saw a demon-angel baby, that’s for sure.”

     “Clarence,” Meg said slowly. “That name. I remember that.”

     “And I remember you,” he said. “Here, in this room. You were my caretaker. I had taken on the torments of Hell, to save Sam Winchester. And I had descended into madness.”

     “Sam Winchester. Do I know him?”

     “He’s my friend,” Castiel said. “I think he may have been a friend to you, too.”

     “ _Have_ been? Did he die?”

     Castiel cast his eyes downward. “No,” he said. “You did. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I would have tried to save you. Somehow, I just… always believed you would come back.”

     “I’m here now,” Meg said. “We’re both here. Wherever this is.”

     “I can help you get your memories back. Do you trust me?”

     She nodded, and he pressed two fingers to her temple. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Images scrolled through the darkness, most of them awful. Fire and torture, with Meg herself on both sides of the blade. Years, decades, centuries of this. And then somewhere at the end of all the fire and darkness, a light. The angel in a ring of fire. His hands in her hair, on her throat lightly pressing and metering her breath as he kissed her, the feeling of his lips on hers and her back against the wall, hard and cold through the fabric of her leather jacket and jeans but not unpleasant inside the heat of that kiss. Then the softness of his hands, tenderly bandaging wounds on her wrists. His smile as warm as whiskey. Their breaths blurring together in the backseat of the car, the moment she’d finally felt all of him.

     Then, cycling back, memories of this very room, its walls solid white then. Memories of sitting in that little chair next to the bed, watching him; of the times he’d brought her fistfuls of drooping flowers from the courtyard, poems he’d written for her in honey on scraps of paper. She’d rejected his advances then – how could she have seriously entertained them, when he wasn’t in his right mind? – but it was the first time anyone had shown her kindness like that, and something in her had started to grow back then. She remembered the time he had shaken and cried out, pleading for her to crawl into the bed beside him, and she had, cradling his head against her shoulder like he was cradling her now. She opened her eyes, and the room was solid again.

     He was still holding her as she winced at a final sharp twist inside her and something broke free, a shrill cry filling the air along with all the light and smoke.

 

___________

 

     They left the building together, three on foot, one on wheels, a fuzzy blue blanket bundled in Meg’s lap, Castiel pushing her chair from behind since her hands were full. The ugly hospital carpet beneath them gave way to sand and moss.

     “End of the line, Castiel,” Billie said, turning toward him. She tapped her scythe against the horizon, and a crack split like lighting through the air just a few feet in front of them. She opened it wide enough for them all to pass through, and just before it closed behind them and the impossible darkness of the Empty swallowed them, the hospital building collapsed in a great wash of sand.

     On the other side, she spoke to him. “It’s time to go back,” she said. “Meg, you’re safe here now. I’ll return you to your sleep.”

     “No.” Castiel stepped forward, clenching jaws and fists.

     Billie sighed. “Must everything be a fight with you?”

     “No,” he repeated. “I’m not leaving her here.”

     “Do you have any idea how _small_ you are to me? You’re like a toddler stomping his feet.”

     Castiel’s eyes softened in his face, turned pleading. “Please,” he said. “I need her.”

     Billie held his stare for a long time, then finally shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “But you know it’s not going to be easy, right? The angel, the demon, and their little abomination?”

     “I know.”

     She looked sharply into his eyes. “Don’t let it distract you.”

     Castiel nodded, and Billie opened a new crack, glowing with bright light along its edges. She turned toward Benny then, as if she was only just now seeing him standing beside her. “And what about you?” she asked him. “Are you going to give me trouble too?”

     “No ma’am,” Benny replied. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon go back to where I came from.”

     “You’re joking.”

     “I’m not. I reckon I could make a home for myself there. There is someone I’d like to say hello to first, though, if you don’t mind.”

     “You’ve got ten minutes,” she said, as she pulled the crack wide enough of them all to pass through. The crack opened into the main library of the Men of Letters bunker in Lebanon, Kansas; standing in front of them there, with stricken expressions on their faces, were Sam and Dean Winchester.

     “Cas!” Sam exclaimed.

     “Benny?” Dean gasped. He stepped slowly forward and wrapped Benny in a tight hug while Sam did the same for Castiel; when Dean and Benny broke apart, Dean clapped Castiel into an embrace. “Good to see you both alive,” he said.

     “Well,” Benny began, just as Sam noticed who had been sitting beside them. “Meg?!”

     “I can’t stay long,” Benny went on. “I just wanted to see how you were doin’. Looks like you’re doin’ all right.”

     “But- what? Why?”

     “This ain’t my place. You know that.” Dean dropped his head and nodded. “It was real good to see you again,” Benny said.

     Dean smiled. “You too.”

     “What is that?” Sam pointed at the blanket Meg was holding. She smiled and unfolded a corner, revealing the most grotesque little creature Sam had ever seen: it had a face somewhere between a baby’s and a gargoyle’s, with stubby horns and pointed ears, a pair of fledgling wings, and a long, spiked tail curling up around its strong shoulders, the tip of it flicking like a cat’s.

     “My son,” Meg said, with a look that dared Sam to say anything further.

     “Well,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “it looks like we have a lot of… catching up to do.”

     “We certainly do,” Castiel said, as the crack behind them closed and Billie and Benny vanished into another world.

     “So, uh, what’s with the chair?” Dean asked Meg. Sam kicked him sharply in the ankle.

     “Your old pal Crowley gave me a little makeover with an angel blade,” she said.

     Sam nodded. “The night you died.”

     “Am I the only one who didn’t know?” Castiel demanded. No one answered, so finally he went on. “I tried to heal her, but the damage was too extensive. The vessel is stable, but she is unable to ambulate.”

     “Yeah, and I couldn’t smoke out because of this beauty.” She extended the forearm marked with the strange red symbol, whose meaning had come flooding back to her along with the rest of her memories back in the hospital. Even if there’d been a suitable body around to jump into, she could tell that she wouldn’t be strong enough to remove the binding she’d put in place herself, locking her into this one.

     “So it looks like I’m stuck in this meatsuit,” she said. “I don’t mind too much, though.” She leaned back in her chair to look up at Castiel; caught his eye and smiled. “I made my best memories in it.”


	8. Chapter 8




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